How can proponents of women’s ordination attempt to take the intellectual high ground when their arguments are so weak? asks

Geoffrey Kirk

There

is a fairly widespread assumption
in the prevailing culture of Britain that people of faith rely on dogma and bigotry and that no one with a
brain can believe in God. I am exaggerating, of course, but you know what I
mean.’ So wrote Jane Williams, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a
theologian in her own right, in the Church Times. She described attitudes
to people of faith in contemporary Britain as ‘lazy’ and ‘scornful’. Meanwhile
the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, has launched a ‘Not Ashamed’
campaign urging Christians to stand up for their rights.

All this is admirable, if a little belated; but it comes
strangely from the lips of two enthusiastic proponents of the ordination of
women. Have they not noticed, one is obliged to ask, that laziness and scorn are
the hallmarks of those within the Church who have relentlessly sought to
marginalize those who in conscience disagree with them?

Accusations of bigotry, misogyny and worse have been stock in
trade. If liberal ‘mainstream’ Anglicans are feeling the pinch now, they are
merely experiencing for themselves the treatment which they have meted out to
others.

Speaking for myself I can bear with something approaching
equanimity the not infrequent insinuations that opposition to women’s ordination
is akin to a sort of personality disorder. It is the wholly unfounded
intellectual arrogance of the women’s ordination lobby which gives me grief. How
in the world can they effortlessly assume the intellectual high ground, when
their arguments are so weak and so fraudulent?

How did it come about, for example, that the General Synod of
the Church of England (a body not noted for either its scholarship or its
intellectual acumen) could opine that ‘there are no fundamental objections’ to
the ordination of women – when the best minds of the two greatest churches in Christendom assert that there are?

One has only for a moment to consider a selection of the
‘arguments’ generally advanced to support the innovation to see how threadbare
is the carpet on which the proponents stand.

Some are persuaded by the role of Mary of Magdala in the
scriptures. Mary is claimed to be ‘apostola Apostolorum’, the apostle to
the Apostles. But on what grounds? In Mark’s Gospel she is mentioned among
others, as visiting the tomb, finding it empty and receiving a message from a
young man in white. But she does not pass on the message. Like the other women
she is silent and afraid.

In Matthew’s account she also visits the tomb accompanied.
There the ‘angel of the Lord’ similarly admonishes them. They see the Risen Lord
and ‘clasp his feet’. They go off, as bidden, to inform the disciples; but this
commission is strictly limited. True, they are sent to the disciples; but it is
to the disciples (‘the eleven’), and not the women, that the Great Commission is
given.

In Luke’s account the women see two men in shining garments
who tell them that the Lord is risen, as he and the scriptures said he would.
They inform the incredulous disciples. But it is Clopas and his companion on the
Emmaus Road who first see the Lord (or Peter [24.34] if his apparition preceded
theirs).

In John’s Gospel the first witness to the resurrection is the
Beloved Disciple, who ‘saw and believed’.

The primacy of the Magdalen, in short, is a sentimental
fiction for which there is, at best, scant evidence on which to base a
revolution in the immemorial practice of the Church.

Others are persuaded by ‘evidence’ of women priests in the
earliest Christian communities. One such enthusiast was the veteran Presbyterian
theologian Tom Torrance, who asserted that a fresco in a Roman catacomb
represents Aquila celebrating the Eucharist with his wife Priscilla and
others, attended by deacons.

None of this is even vaguely plausible. All disinterested
authorities date the painting to the end of the second century; there is no
evidence of the connection with Priscilla until the twelfth century; the present
state of the fresco makes it impossible to determine the sex of the
participants. Why a scholar with an international reputation should risk it on
erroneous assertions about a painting he had clearly never seen is a question to
be asked.

Then there are the ill-founded assertions of the ‘bigotry’
and ‘misogyny’ of the Christian past. Take, for example, the oft-repeated myth
about the Council of Macon (585 AD). There, as a female archdeacon told me only
recently, it was decided that women have no souls. But not so.

As Professor Nolan (of the University of Dublin) has shown,
the acts of the council contain neither ‘mulier’ nor ‘anima’. Such
a discussion quite simply never took place; and the book which asserted that it
had was placed on the index of prohibited books by Pope Innocent X (published,
Lyons, 1647; prohibited, Rome, 1651). So much for the claim that the Church
continued to uphold the ‘opinion’!

The archdeacon in question – though she has no reputation
such as Torrance’s to defend – could nevertheless have done a Google search and
ascertained the facts of the matter for herself.

The truth of all this is only too apparent. The proponents of
women’s ordination have a priori reasons for their enthusiasm. Those
reasons prove to be impervious to historical or rational refutation. ‘Lazy’ and
‘scornful’ is, I would say, a good working description. Jane Williams and George
Carey should be careful that they do not slip into the bad habits that they so
accurately ascribe to others.